


Soul Stained Lullabies

by nesrynfaliq



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: (a little bit), F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Mostly Fluff, post acomaf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-04
Updated: 2016-08-04
Packaged: 2018-07-29 05:13:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7671439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nesrynfaliq/pseuds/nesrynfaliq
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucien’s POV, post ACOMAF, established relationship: A little bit of domesticity involving the inability to sleep and shared creative impulses. </p>
<p>Teaser:  She likes to be there for me if I have nightmares, comfort me, hold me in her arms until it passes and I know that. But I hadn’t been able to bring myself to wake her tonight, to interrupt her peace and rest with more darkness and pain. She’s had enough of that already. We both have.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soul Stained Lullabies

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by this beautiful piece of fanart: http://meabhd.tumblr.com/post/148112989209/super-quick-sketch-cause-i-love-therealsjmaas

I couldn’t sleep. There wasn’t anything new in that, particularly. My dreams had been nightmares for centuries now, dark, twisted things that left me shaking and unsettled. I had found different ways of occupying my mind after waking and keeping it in such a state that prevented me from drifting off again until the need was dire.

Things had improved somewhat in recent months however, with Elain by my side, my sleep has become a little more peaceful. In her arms I had found that it was possible to dream again. Something I had long since given up hope of ever experiencing again before I found her.

 The corners of my mouth twitch up slightly at the thought of my mate. Her name, either given form by my lips or only echoing in the emptiness of my mind always seems to taste sweet and feel right and rarely fails to bring a smile to my lips, slight though it may be.

I glance over my shoulder from where I’m hunched at the end of our bed and my eyes fall upon her. Sleeping behind me, the sheets arranged neatly around her slight form and there’s such a peace to her that for a moment all I can do is stare at her. So gentle and soft and sweet, my mate, and I offer a quick, silent murmuring of thanks to the Mother for letting her have this quiet moment.

 Since her Making I know she’s struggled to sleep as well but now, in our bed, I’m glad she can find the freedom to dream pleasantly again. She deserves nothing but sweet dreams.

Resisting the urge to move to her side once more and kiss her brow, run my fingers through the strands of her golden hair that have come free of their restraining braid I turn my attention back to the messy sheets of paper spread out before me. The small, precise lines and dots remain neatly waiting for me to finish them and not for the first time since I began this I’m struck with confusion.

 It’s been decades, centuries perhaps, since I’ve felt the stirring in my soul required for this but tonight...Tonight I couldn’t help myself. Something thrummed deep within me, a calling I had thought had died in my youth along with the shreds of hope I’d managed to cling to in Autumn had woken something within me again and I couldn’t help but answer it.

Lifting my pen from the sheets I began adding more to the papers in front of me, working with an almost feverish intensity. I find myself being carried away on the back of the black ink I scratch carefully onto the parchment. The world slips away and my heart lightens at the rediscovery of a joy I’ve deprived my soul of for too long now. I’m rusty and clumsy after so long, as though my mind has been numbed to this skill and the composition is rough and lacking any sense of refinement or delicacy but...It helps.

I might have sat absorbed in the creation that flowed from my fingertips for minutes or hours without ever being sure. All I know is that the only intervention of reality I’m aware of in the time I spend cradled in the shelter of the darkness placing small pieces of my soul in black ink on parchment is the touch of my mate’s soft, warm hand against my bare skin. She traces her fingers gently along my spine, making my back arch for her slightly and I start violently, not having heard her wake or approach me.

She murmurs a soft apology against my body as she leans down and presses a light kiss to the nape of my neck, sweeping my hair over a shoulder to grant her access. I smile gently at her and reach back, fumbling slightly as I find and squeeze her hand, “It’s all right, dove,” I reassure her quietly, my voice hoarse and raw, a reminder of the nightmares that had woken me earlier.

“You can’t sleep?” she asks, blinking down at me with something like reproach in her rich, dark eyes and I understand the implication, the unspoken chiding, _you should have woken me_.

 She likes to be there for me if I have nightmares, comfort me, hold me in her arms until it passes and I know that. But I hadn’t been able to bring myself to wake her tonight, to interrupt her peace and rest with more darkness and pain. She’s had enough of that already. We both have.

I shake my head, catching her hand and bringing it to my mouth, lightly brushing her knuckles against my lips, “Go back to sleep,” I coax her quietly, cupping her cheek in my hand and stroking tenderly, “I’m fine,” I assure her.

Instead she draws level with me, settling herself down on her stomach, propped up on her forearms, a mirror of my own position. I watch her with unguarded pleasure, my mate, so beautiful, so beautiful.

She wears nothing but a small, delicate nightdress, a deep, rich plum colour that hugs her delicate curves in a way that makes it almost impossible to resist running my hands over her body. Her thick golden hair is pulled into a loose braid over one shoulder and she still has that endearing, ruffled, slightly dazed look of one who’s recently awoken from sleep. Perfect, in short, is how she looks to me.

“I’m not tired,” she insists quietly, scanning my face as I absently lift a hand and brush a few loose strands of her hair behind an ear.

She starts slightly at the feeling of the ink I accidentally smear across her cheek, like a whisper of black war paint against her pale creamy skin. Laughing lightly I wet my thumb and wipe it away but too late. As I lower my hand she catches it in her own, noting the ink stains on the tips of my fingers with a raised eyebrow. I shrug, suddenly self conscious, and at the same moment we both look down at the mess of papers spread out before me.

She studies them intently, the strands of her I had just tucked behind her ear escaping their tenuous restraint and falling over her face. I feel a faint burn of colour flood my cheeks as she takes in my rough, messy handiwork but then she looks at me, a light shining in her velvet smooth eyes and it causes me to pause, the casual lines I had immediately composed to brush off her attention never quite making it past my throat.

“Is this music?” she asks quietly, filling the silence I so unwisely left open to invite her questions, a decidedly undeserved reverence in her voice as she looks at me.

“It’s nothing,” I insist pathetically.

Feeling unaccountably flustered I shake my head and try to gather up the sheets and push them  clumsily out of sight, casting around for an airy change of subject I can use to divert her away from this. I can’t explain satisfactorily, even to myself, why I wouldn’t want to share this with her. She’s seen almost every part of me now but this part, a stranger even to myself, hits a familiar wall of reluctance within me, inspiring the desire to hide it away from the world lest it be stolen away.

Gently, her small, deft hands curl around the bottom of the pages and draw them towards her, her eyes on me, questioning and beseeching all at once. And Mother damn me, whenever she looks at me like that I can never fail to give her whatever she wishes. If she asked me with that look on her face to catch her the moon on a string I would immediately start casting around for some rope. I relinquish the papers and she leans forwards and offers me a swift, grateful peck on the cheek before settling back into her earlier position. I try and tell myself that whatever happens next the kiss will have made it worth it.

I watch, slightly curious in spite of myself and my reticence on this hidden part of myself, as she studies the sheets before her with an intensity I’ve rarely seen in her before. Her eyes glide over the neat rows of lines and dots that transform into beats and melodies to a practiced eye, taking in each individual note, brushing a few of them with her fingers, as though she can feel the impressions my soul has made on the paper through each one.

After a long moment in which she looks so enraptured I can’t bring myself to interrupt her she does something I never would have expected that almost makes me topple off of the bed in shock and wonder. Quietly, absently, she begins to hum to herself, capturing the music I had tried to set down on the page so perfectly that my heart tightens, my heartstrings shivering like the plucked threads of a harp, the melody burning through my blood as she gives life to my rough scratchings.

 Not for the first time, nor the last I suspect, wonder flares in my chest as I marvel at my mate and try to comprehend what I ever did to deserve such a blessing from the Cauldron.

“I had no idea you could read it,” I say, my voice rasping and still faintly weak with shock as I stare at Elain, gesturing towards the sheets of music she’s just translated into sound.

She shrugs, looking rather self conscious herself as she admits, “My mother tried to have me learn to play violin when I was younger. I wasn’t very good but these lessons stuck,” she indicates the written music before us again then adds, “She was a little disappointed I didn’t take to it. She thought it might make it easier for me to find a husband if I had a skill, something I could use to entrance all the men who came to her parties I suppose.”

“Well, she was right about one thing,” I tell her, russet eye twinkling as I lower my voice and lean in to purr in her ear, “I’m certainly entranced.”

A faint pink blush creeps into her cheeks in response to those words and she elbows me with reproachful affection, a smile tugging irresistibly at her delicate mouth. Then she leans in and presses a soft kiss to my cheek and I feel my smile grow again. Her fingers wind slowly and absently through my hair as she glances back down at the music between us that bonds us now.

“What about you?” she asks me quietly, nudging in a little closer and nuzzling at my neck in a way she must know I love.

I shrug and mumble some vague response about having had some passing interest years ago, making it sound as though it had been of little importance, merely a fleeting fancy I had grown tired of, though the opposite was true. She shifts slightly on the bed beside him and gives him that uncharacteristically sharp, piercing no-nonsense look that tells me plainly she knows I’m full of it.

“This is beautiful, Lucien,” she murmurs quietly, brushing the paper with her fingers, again with that reverent air she had displayed earlier while studying it, “You obviously played and were good at it and...” she hesitates a moment, biting her lip but then she meets my gaze again and her hand reaches across the pages and takes mine as she adds, voice low, “You obviously loved it.”

“How did you know?” I whisper, my voice tight. I’ve spent so long cultivating thick iron walls around myself, keeping everyone out, never letting them see anything beneath a cold, indifferent surface. It still startles me sometimes how she can look at me and see through it all with such ease, to the very core of me. How all she’s ever needed to do, from the moment that we met, was look into my eyes to understand me in a way some who’ve known me for decades will never fathom.

In answer she lifts our still joined hands and places mine palm first against her chest. Her skin is warm through the thin, sheer fabric of her nightgown and I can feel her heart beating beneath skin and bone. Beating in time with mine, in time with the melody I had written and she had breathed life into.

I know she means to refer to the bond that tethers our souls with this and I close my eyes, pressing my brow against hers as she sends a confused tangle of emotions to me through it, my own emotions, I realise, that I must have sent her while I listened to her hum the piece.

“Flute,” I murmur into her brassy hair, my breath stirring it. I know from the way she presses in close to me, her soft, warm body fitting in against mine, letting me know that she’s there for me, that she understands the gravity, the significance of that word, the history behind it and the twisted blend of agony and ecstasy that fills me at the thought of it even now.

Jostling me tenderly she then draws away slightly to enable her to look at me as she asks, her voice trembling slightly at the weight of emotion that’s passing between the two of us as I try and share with her what this means to me, the music itself yes, but also her understanding of it and the compassion that I’ve felt from her, “How long?”

“Years...” I admit to her, my voice trailing away as I consider it.

It had been such a huge part of my life once, so many centuries ago. An escape from the horrors of the Autumn Court, something I could lose myself in when it became too much. In a court that felt so often as though it had been created to destroy, to collect in the gifts of Spring and Summer and drain the life from them to pass them into Winter’s waiting, deathly cold embrace the ability to create something had always been something I had cherished. There had been a certain rebellion in sitting amongst a forest perpetually entering into the final death throes and breathing a new kind of life into the world.

 It had been something I had been sad to lose, something I had mourned and grieved for almost as much as the love they had ripped from my arms and butchered before me. But after her death there had no longer been a place in my heart or in my world for anything as sweet and hopeful as music. It had died with her and I had never thought to find it within me again, had never believed I could ever _want_ to find it within me again but Elain... _Elain._

I realise that she’s changed so much of me without me ever truly noticing or appreciating what she’s done. The scars I had come to realise long ago that not even an immortal’s time in this world could put right have begun to heal beneath her gentle love and hope. And this, these pieces of paper, my ink stained fingers and the echoes of song that whisper tentatively through the hollow chambers of my heart feel so much like hope that the emotion of it clogs my chest and threatens to drown me.

But then she’s there again, pressing soft kisses to my lips and bringing me back to her, grounding her, sweeping up some of those raging feelings and drawing them into herself via our bond, sharing them with me. When she looks up at me her beautiful dark eyes are shining with a thin film of tears and I know she’s felt what I’ve felt and she understands all the things I can’t ever find the words to express for her. She kisses me again, more deeply this time, and I respond in kind.

When she draws away and retreats back to the pages of music spread out before us, drinking them in as though they’re a feast I find myself whispering hoarsely, without really thinking about what I’m asking until the words have left my lips and it’s too late to call them back to reason, “Would, would you sing it again for me?” I ask her quietly.

Elain looks up at me and a soft smile spreads across her face. She leans in and presses another gentle kiss to my lips then nods her head. Taking a deep breath she scans the pages once more then closes her eyes and begins to hum once more. Her voice is smooth and rich as velvet gilded by honey and I let it wash over me until I’m drowning in it, in her.  I will never be able to have enough of this woman, not if we live for thousands of years in one another’s arms, it will never be long enough, I would always be yearning for just a little bit more.

Her eyes flutter open as she finishes and they lift from the sheets of music in front of her to look at me again. She links, something like surprise in her face as she takes in the way I’m gazing at her. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks me softly, startled, always so startled by how I can find such wonder in everything she does.

She was always so quiet, so unassuming and so unnoticed. It was her sisters that people tended to pay attention to, Nesta, the unyielding, roaring fire drawing every eye and every attention and casting her sister into shadow. A place that she was always happy to be a peaceful, quiet, calm place that suited her wants and needs. But it leaves her baffled by my attentions, by my adoration and wonder.

Swallowing hard I murmur hoarsely, “Because sometimes I still can’t believe that you’re real,” I tell her, the raw, intense honesty of my feelings for her shocking even me at times, “And I can’t believe that you- that you’re mine.” My mate, my partner, my love, my lady. _Mine._ A blessing I’ll thank the Mother for every day, one I’m still not sure that I deserve but I love her, Cauldron boil me I love her and I’m already planning to spend eternity finding ways to be worthy of her. My mate.

A rich blush colours her cheeks, making the light dusting of freckles that pepper her creamy skin like stars in the night sky stand out even more vividly as she does so. She ducks her head slightly, a soft smile on her lips and I find a slow, easy grin spreading across my own lips as I look at her.

Clearing her throat lightly she unfolds her arms from where she had them tucked beneath herself and deftly tugs the pen from my unresisting fingers. I watch her as she leans down- tongue between her teeth in a distinctly unladylike and undignified pose that makes me smile because I know she would never let anyone but me see it- and alters and adds a few notes in the piece, humming lightly under her breath as she does so. I scan the bars and hear the changes she’s made and my smile broadens as I realise that whatever the piece had been missing before it no longer is.

“I love you,” I murmur, my voice deep and husky and I lean in to kiss her, slow and intense and filled with the feeling that burns through me for her. My fingers slide into her thick golden braid and tug her closer and she complies, pressing in against me, her palms pressing flat against my bare chest.

“I love you too,” she whispers, a little breathless from our kiss, her forehead pressed gently against mine, “I love you too,” she says again, her voice lower and richer than before a moment before she leans in and kisses me once again, as though to seal her declaration.

****

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! ^_^ as always feedback is greatly appreciated if you have a moment.


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